Jews: Ash & Nazi-When Etymology Echoes Extinction

AJS Review, 2012

This article traces the Yiddish term “Red Jews” in legends about the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to its origins in early modern Jewish and Christian lore. The Red Jews are best known from modern Yiddish literature, most notably from Mendele’s Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third (1878). Why, however, are the Ten Tribes associated with this specific color in Yiddish, a unique feature that is without parallel in any other Jewish language? The choice of this color is by no means random. Neither is it merely a humorous stylistic device that originated in Eastern European Jewish tradition, as standard dictionaries suggest. This particular attribute was in fact part of Yiddish linguistic usage long before Mendele’s writings—its usage emerged among the Jews of pre-modern Central Europe, who adopted it from contemporaneous Christian culture. This study explores how the idea of the Red Jews developed in and adapted to changing religious, cultural and political contexts, starting with the evolution of the expression, its etymology, and the legend of the Red Jews in Jewish-Christian polemics. It then places the discussion within a broader framework, by addressing general questions about the interpenetration of Jewish and Christian end-time expectations in early modern Germany.

2024

First lecture as Marko Feingold fellow at PLUS in Salzburg. A published version will appear in Biblische Notizen

Revue Des Etudes Juives, 2004

This paper introduces a methodology to approach the question of the origins of Yiddish. It stresses the importance of the defining the exact geographical locations and time frames of various elements of Yiddish, distinguishing between those peculiar to that tongue as a whole and those of only regional significance. Also of interest is the distinction between elements unique to Yiddish and those shared with German and Slavic languages. These methodological principles are applied for several purposes: (1) to compare different theories of the origins of Yiddish; (2) to introduce formal definitions allowing to address the question of mono- or polygenesis of Yiddish; (3) to extract the onomastic layer of Proto-Yiddish. The paper shows that important differences between various Yiddish linguists are partly related to purely methodological aspects of their analysis: these authors use (implicitly or explicitly) distinct definitions for several key terms. Concerning the historical conclusions about the origins of Ashkenazic Jewry drawn by linguists from their theories about Yiddish, it is shown – using the analysis of personal names - that the descendants of Jews who lived in the Middle Ages in the Rhine-Moselle valley played an important role in the formation of the Ashkenazic communities in various German and Slavic countries. As a result, contrary to the claim of certain Yiddish linguists, the Rhenish paradigm of Ashkenazic history should not be rejected

cco.regener-online.de

Anti-Semitism in youth language: the pejorative use of the terms for "Jew" in German and French today 1 Kurzfassung: Der Autor untersucht anhand qualitativer Interviews wie die Worte für "Jude" im Deutschen und Französischen abwertend und als Schimpfwort verwendet werden. Die Formen, Funktionen und Auswirkungen des Phänomens sind trotz der zwei verschiedenen Sprachen und unterschiedlichen Kontexte in Frankreich und Deutschland ähnlich. Es wird gezeigt, wie der abwertende Gebrauch der Worte "Jude" im deutschen und "Juif" und "Feuj" im Französischen offenen Antisemitismus banalisiert. Der abwertende Gebrauch der Worte für "Jude" führt zu negativen und damit antisemitischen Konnotationen im Begriff "Jude", die nicht trennbar sind von antisemitischen Wahrnehmungen von Juden. Darüber hinaus fördert der abwertende Gebrauch der Worte "Jude", "Juif" und "Feuj" die Etablierung einer antisemitischen sprachlichen Norm und eine antisemitische Sozialordnung, die gemeinsam den Boden bereiten für antisemitische verbale und physische Gewalt.

2010

Anti-Semitism in youth language: the pejorative use of the terms for "Jew" in German and French today 1

2012

Haverkamp, Eva. "Jews in Christian Europe. Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages." The Wiley Blackwell History of Jews and Judaism. Ed. Alan T. Levenson. Oxford, 2012. 169-206.

A Response to Roberto Calasso, Indian Classics: The Big New Vision; http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/sep/24/indian-classics-big-new-vision/.

Applying the terms "Jew" and "Judaism" in the ancient period has recently been challenged by a number of scholars. First, the terms translated as Jew and Judaism are rare in the ancient period, and second, it is argued that these terms retroject later understandings of Judaism as a religion back into a period when Israelites and Yehudim/Ioudaioi are rather understood as an ethnic group. "Judeans" is preferable as a designation to "Jews." Two challenges have arisen. Some argue that the ethnic meaning of Yehudim/Ioudaioi changed to a more religious meaning in about 100 B. C. E.. Others insist that "Jew" and "Judaism" have always communicated both an ethnic and religious meaning-and still do-and so to insist on an ethnic-only meaning ("Judeans") in the ancient period is misleading. Here I take up a number of the previous arguments and modify them to form an alternative proposal: Yehudi (feminine Yehudiyah) and related terms arose as assertive, emotive identity terms to reflect a strong affirmation of identity in an international situation. Much as "Quaker" or "American" can be assertive, emotive identity terms relative to the default Society of Friends or United States respectively, so Yehudi/Yehudiyah was used occasionally, then more often, as a strong identity term relative to the default Israel/Israelite. Every twenty years or so, scholars take up each of their most used terms and exclaim, "I can't believe that this term has accumulated so many unexamined accretions." The term is then thrown into the wash on the heavy-duty cycle to wash away the accretions, and when it is taken out again and held up, the term has shrunk, unable to do the work it once did. The goal is a sort of precision and linguistic purity, perhaps an inevitable result of the "linguistic turn" in theory (which, ironically, also includes a critique of the possibility of an objective precision). These terms sometimes bounce back, but sometimes they remain permanently shrunk and reduced in their use. Within Jewish Studies it has recently been argued that "Judean" should be used rather than "Jew" as a translation for Yehudi or Ioudaios, and "Judeans," understood as an ethnic group, rather than "Jews" or "Judaism" as a religion. 1 A correlative challenge is the question of when "Judaism" began, or when "Jew" should be used as the appropriate term for a member of the Jewish "religion." These interrelated questions have 1 See Paula Fredriksen's article, "Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 35 (2006): 231-46, although it is important to note that she does not suggest retiring "Jew" or "Judaism." The substance of this article was first delivered as the Presidential Address of the New England and Eastern Canada Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, April 24, 2015. I would like to thank those who responded there and others who helped me shape this argument:

2019

The article examines the various presentations of Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli fiction. Ashkenazi identity in Israel is controversial both in everyday life and in fiction. However, the literary and artistic manifestations of Ashkenazi Jews are quite different from their political and social image. Ashkenazi Jews are usually portrayed as the intellectual, economic, and professional elite, and also as those who were responsible for the inequality between Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe and Jews from Arabic countries. They are depicted by the Israeli media as those who forced the oriental Jews to settle in remote towns in Israel, thus denying them the ability to move up the social ladder. The arrogant, upper-middle-class Ashkenazi is often absent from Israeli literature. Israeli artists of Ashkenazi origin present themselves in autobiographical literature as “weak” or “problematic” and they add a “fragile” aspect to the Ashkenazi identity. The Ashkenazi Jew is depicted as an ins...

Naharaim, 2021

This article examines the dynamics that allowed the derogatory term "Ostjuden" to reappear in academic writing in post-Holocaust Germany. This article focuses on the period between 1980's and 2000's, complementing earlier studies that focused on the emergence of the term "Ostjuden" and on the complex representations of Eastern European Jews in Imperial and later Weimar Germany. It shows that, despite its well-evidenced discriminatory history, the term "Ostjuden" reappeared in the scholarly writing in German and has also found its way into German-speaking public history and journalism. This article calls for applying the adjectival term "osteuropäische Juden" (Eastern European Jews), using a term that neither essentializes Eastern European Jews nor presents them in an oversimplified and uniform manner. The information concerning Gustav Landauer (footnote 21) is incorrect. Ludger Heid whom I quote here misinterpreted Landauer. It was not Landauer, but two German publicists Wolfgang Heinze and Georg Fritz who wrote of Eastern European Jews as “Carthaginian ghosts,” who “swarmed at the East gate” of Germany. Landauer was in fact criticizing both publicists. See Gustav Landauer, “Ostjuden und Deutsches Reich.“ Der Jude 1, (7) 1916, s. 436.

Journal of Jewish Languages, 2018

This article discusses the notion of ‘Jewish surnames,’ considering it to be synonymous to the expression ‘surnames borne by Jews.’ This can be particularly helpful if we want the definition to add real value for the search of etymologies. The article describes most important peculiarities of Jewish surnames, categories of names that are exclusively Jewish, and various cases when a surname is shared by both Jews and non-Jews. It shows that certain alternative definitions of the notion of ‘Jewish surnames’ (such as surnames found in all Jewish communities, surnames used by Jews only, surnames based on specifically Jewish linguistic elements) either have internal inconsistencies or are useless and sometimes misleading for the scientific analysis of the etymologies of these surnames.

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2022

While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post- 1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to “map the margins” (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ.

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 1993

Israel, and was Visiting Professor in the University of Toronto (1991-92), both in the Department of History and in the Jewish Studies Program. The research for this article was completed with assistance from the Bar Ilan Research Agency (Israel) and the Arnold Finkler Memorial Lecture (Toronto).